


etta's view

by jaggedmountains



Category: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-15 23:59:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12331455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaggedmountains/pseuds/jaggedmountains
Summary: she tells him, I have this image in my mind.





	etta's view

She grew up in a small town on the border of the trees of Oklahoma and the Wild West of Texas. Well, she grew up in the Wild West, and in Bolivia, but she lived the first years of her life on that border. The town had false front stores and dusty lanes, and the houses had whitewashed porches and old, tall sycamores with long swings. 

Etta was attracted to danger, adventure. She lived the first years of her life hopelessly chasing birds, studying books with words too big for her, hiding behind doors to listen to the tales the men who traveled east through the town told, the reasons they were leaving the rocks and sun for greenery and shade. A bullet in the leg (her heart raced). A year’s earnings lost at a gambling table (her guts churned). A weariness from running (her legs twitched). She skirted the lines of tomboy, little academic, and normal girl. 

She was engaged for three months. He had courted her, gentlemanly, for almost a year, and she had seen him, happily, for that same time. He asked her for her hand before he asked her parents, and she loved him for that. They were engaged for three months of wedding preparation and her feet grew heavier every time she walked to his side. A week before, she laid her dress out on the kitchen table and carefully took every seam out, reshaped and re sewed the lace and buttons until a short underdress and longer slip lay on the table. He watched her, and kissed her goodbye, and there was no wedding.

Etta’s young eyes and mind had served her well, and the small town in Wyoming gave her the job as school teacher almost as soon as she listed the books she had read. Etta liked her students and tried to teach them material she found interesting, and she liked the crazy, heart-throb, bone-ache mountains and eventually she loved the crazy, heart-throb, soul-ache men who rode down from them.

Sundance (Harry) (Sundance) courted her after he and Butch (Robert) (Butch) nearly ran her over on her walk home with a mad pack of horses and more paper money than they knew what to do with. Well, they knew exactly what to do with it. Etta wore new dresses and, once Sundance knew her better (and she had chosen the way he tried to be a gentleman over Butch’s shameless flirting), read new books and wore strong, expensive boots. 

As she grows older she wished she’d gone with Butch. Of course she’d make the same decision again, but though Sundance makes her feel loved, needed, when she’s with Butch she’s younger and lighter. Sundance reminds her that she actually needs to be grounded, by books or dresses or students, by trees and towns, or she would turn as crazy as them, she would transmute dusty and vivacious and bleeding and running like the men who drank the pub dry when they went back east through her hometown. 

Etta goes with them because she knows they’re going to die. Etta goes with them because it’s true love, both of them, and if E. H. Harriman wants to kill them then they’re going to die, and she’d rather get the most out of them then protect herself. 

She has the time of her life being bad. She points unloaded guns for show and points loaded guns when Butch and Sundance aren’t looking and she can load one up. She knows how. She wears fancier dresses than she ever has and enjoys being a lady for once, because it’s not her at all and so easily torn off once the handbag’s full of gold. She climbs trees and wears trousers, too, and runs her hands through her hair and laughs with her boys and laughs even more when she sees that white straw hat because dammit, she came to enjoy.

Etta gets cold feet in the end, or maybe she just knows she’s gotten all she can, because she goes back to Wyoming and collects her old kettle and wash bin and some books and trinkets from their storage in the back of the church (where the town puts all the lost things they can’t sell), and moves to Utah and gets religion. Or she collects her things and moves to Colorado and stares at mountains and teaches children mathematics. Or she buys new things because really, they’ve made thousands off Bolivia and she can afford it, and moves to New York and enrolls in a college. Or she steps off a train in Oklahoma and realizes they are dead. 

Etta says hello to her family (much tears) and funds a new porch and porch swing and meets her sibling’s spouses, and leaves again. Etta teaches English and mathematics and history in a homestead town in Kansas and marries a man who is competent and kind and a little wild. He wakes in the night fighting off dream bandits and she tells him, I have this image in my mind. 

There’s a stone courtyard in the mountains, well, it’s not really a courtyard, it’s a whole town, but it's got tall dusty mud walls that hold the whole thing together. There are thatched roofs and some stone ones, all strong enough for soldiers and their rifles to stand on. The ground well-used dusty, like the people who sell native pottery and small watermelons. There are pillared outdoor corridors and metal bars to close on some doors and wooden carts everywhere, horses everywhere, sacks and sacks of grain. I see small sun shelters of cloth and grass mats held up on poles. I can see an upturned table, two rare steaks lying among shattered plates, some small patches of blood leading to this big open doorway. I can see two men running out of it, shooting. I can see it like it’s frozen in my mind. The way they point their guns. See the way the men on the walls shout fuego, fuego. I can see more and more of it the longer I look, like I’m going backwards, and I never stop looking.


End file.
